solutions by chance

Photo Albums

Most people who know me, know that I love to take pictures. Oh, I'm not a photographer, I'm a snapshot-rapher. I love to take snap shots all the time and share them with friends. Typically, I use my digital camera but recently invested in a cell phone with a camera. (And bluetooth and a bluetooth USB interface which I may write on later.)

I also build websites for a living and I am constantly asked about putting photo albums on client websites. I try to keep it simple for my customers and not go into the intricate details of the challenges of publishing images online. Even as a webmaster, I use Flickr.com because it's easy.

What's the big deal? Well, when you take a digital picture, typically the camera is set so that the user can make prints of the images. This is a good thing. The problem is the images are too big. They are too wide, too high and take up too much disk space which also causes load time issues online. A load time issue is cause due to the size in bytes and the fact all those bytes have to be transferred from the server to the browser. Some digital images can be several megabytes each and when someone is browsing the images, all that data must be transferred thus causing load time issues as well as server load and bandwidth issues.

What's the solution? To first decrease the size of each original image so it can be viewed on a computer screen and doesn't take up so much bandwidth when loading. Typically, a image folder contains many images so this process can be time consuming. Another method of presenting and organizing the images is to create smaller versions called thumbnails so many images can be view on one page as kind of a preview of the original.

In the past, I've used Thumbs+ by Cerious software. http://www.cerious.com/thumbsplus.shtml I've been using it for years to organize the images on my hard drive as well as performing "batch" editing for easier upload to a website. The only problem I had with it was trying to educate my clients in it's use as well as some of the quirky professional or advanced options. It's not expensive but clients also baulked at the price of the software. I still use Thumbs+ and would recommend it to anyone.

I wanted to find a way to allow my clients the ability to organize, edit, caption, upload and share photos on their websites without the need to involve the webmaster. This is important for two main reasons... 1) I'm expensive. I charge by the hour and after an invoice or two, clients typically decide that the photo album is too costly. 2) Clients want control. They want to be able to add, delete, edit or otherwise make immediate changes to their web albums.

I've been looking at a number of tools but just this morning was introduced to a great FREE little application that may have solve my issues. It's called Jalbum and though it requires a download and installation, I think it is easy enough that I can create a web project and templates that will work in my client websites nicely.

Here's what I hope to accomplish:

1) Create a preset Jalbum project that already has the FTP location and logins entered.

2) Have the client website style sheets and templates already installed in the interface. This may be difficult but a thorough instructional page may solve the issue. Also, a zip file installation may also help.

3) Instruct the client on how to manipulate the images on their hard drive and how to add files and folders to their own website using this software.

If I create the template (skin) properly, it should mesh nicely with the existing web file structure and SoKy.Net's content management system.

Hopefully, this will allow for an easy way for my customers to publish their own photos online. I have some more testing to do, but this looks very promising.

http://jalbum.net/